>> Subscriptions should be able to be paid by invoices - you receive an invoice before next billing period and if you don't pay, account is locked,
>Why should the service provider hope for your compliance to pay for an already rendered service?
1. No one implied that they have to provide you a service first before you pay. OP said "invoice before next billing period". I.e. if you don't pay before the next period starts, you don't get access to the service. I don't see why this is that hard. This purely serves the provider offering the service which somehow wants to put you in some sort of contractual month to month contract as opposed to "pay before you get access" model.
2. You could turn it around: "Why should the payer hope for the service that's already been paid for?" There are contracts and norms for starters. The "subscription arrangement" makes it entirely the payer's problem to cancel the service, or to keep track of it's lack of usage (the Gym membership model). One can definitely argue that it's predatory, and certainly so if it's combined with how difficult it sometimes is to cancel subscriptions.
>"What do you mean by "basically"? You write a mail."
This is never that simple, your hypothetical "they're reasonable and respond to reasonable email requests" is not how it works in practice. Past a certain growth size of the provider, there isn't even an email address you can email that's actively monitored and actioned.
Well.. they're not. I've first hand experienced "what if they accidently charge you for who knows what" as I mentioned in my example and I recall many, many stories on HN regarding problems with subscriptions related to these "hypotheticals". Not to mention that the "what if you simply forget you even had a subscription?" is probably the most common, I doubt most people periodically check their credit cards history and given how many subscriptions an average person have, it's way too easy to forget you've subscribed to something - maybe in a heat of a moment or for "free trial" that required your CC and started charging you once the free trial expired.
Yes, in theory, you write an email. But in practice, most of the big companies do their best to hide any human-observed mailbox behind a quick and sloppy "customer support FAQ with a useless search bar" page.
You are misreading it. Not an email. A mail. The paper variant. And depending on the rules of your country you often want to do that as "registered mail". Again this changes jurisdiction by jurisdiction but where I am from registered mail is useful to show others that you tried to contact them. With regular mail they can just say "so bad, so sad, the dog must have eaten it". With registered mail there is (sometimes and again depending on your jurisdiction) as "assumption of receipt".
> hide any human-observed mailbox behind a quick and sloppy "customer support FAQ with a useless search bar" page.
These are companies. They have offices and staff. The business world runs on official correspondence. The governments and courts for sure don't send them messages via a chat box.
They don't want you to use those channels because it would be too costly for them. But if they truly dropped the ball as the OP's comment implies you can do that.
Plus you can always call you bank and say "hey there is this money taken from my account. I don't recognise it. Can you tell me what is this?" And they will give you how you can contact the counterparty to dispute the charge.
You write an email is so last century. These days it's:
"You hopelessly try to get any contact info out of the company's chatbot and fail. If there even is a chatbot. Then you post your problem on the web and submit it to HN and hope it makes the front page."
What do you mean by "basically"? You write a mail.
> what if they accidently charge you for who knows what?
Then you write a mail. Businesses are not all that keen on manually resolving issues like this, so they will try to avoid them.
> what if you simply forget you even had a subscription?
Yes, not using the things you paid for seems something you would want to avoid, in one of two ways. This is not a subscription problem.
> Subscriptions should be able to be paid by invoices - you receive an invoice before next billing period and if you don't pay, account is locked,
Why should the service provider hope for your compliance to pay for an already rendered service?
These hypotheticals seem awfully contrived.